Research Bureau backs Common Core

WORCESTER — The Research Bureau is releasing a report Thursday endorsing the Common Core State Standards Initiative, but also offered recommendations it said would improve school standards adopted by Massachusetts and 43 other states.

The state adopted the new Common Core standards in 2010, and is now piloting the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers testing program as a way to measure the new standards.

The Research Bureau report recommended that "The Commonwealth, and Greater Worcester, should continue working toward full implementation of the revised Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks based on the Common Core and standards-based assessments for students, teachers, and schools."

It goes on to state that "It represents the best thinking on educational policy and learning standards by national, state, and local leaders."

But The Research Bureau also included several recommendations for improving the system, including that the state continue to promote the full range of academic subjects under its current curriculum frameworks to avoid "teaching to the test," since the Common Core focuses on math and English language arts.

The state should also continue to provide and update standards for all major subjects, the report states. It recommends the state modify or augment any state-based assessment tests, such as PARCC, to incorporate state-specific standards. Under Common Core, each state can incorporate up to 15 percent of additional standards per subject area.

"Massachusetts must work with the PARCC consortium to ensure that each state has the capability of including additional state-specific standards into the testing process," the report states.

The report also recommends that the state and local districts coordinate on a capital plan for assessing existing technology, upgrading out-of-date systems, and procuring new equipment, potentially through the state School Building Authority.

It recommends that local school districts make all testing results available to administrators, teachers, and parents, and that the state review the current timeline for the use of test results to assess student, teacher, and school performance.

"Until the assessment process is deemed reliable, and its role in teacher and school district evaluations are clear, it should not be used to measure system quality," the report states.

The report lastly recommends that the state establish a defined evaluation and public review process for the new state curriculum frameworks and the new assessment program.

School Committee member Tracy O'Connell Novick has been critical of the rollout of the PARCC testing, and said Wednesday she felt the new standards haven't lived up to the hype in either direction. She said people have had to digest varied opinions on Common Core and the PARCC tests.

"It's a switch in the set of standards," Ms. O'Connell Novick said. "It's not as terrible as they may have heard, but it's not as wonderful and they may have heard, either."

She said the key will be keeping a close eye on what it does to the local curriculum to make sure the district is not losing anything valuable in the process. She said that with MCAS there's already a continuous push against "teaching to the test."

And when it comes to using PARCC results to evaluate teachers, Ms. O'Connell Novick said it would be a disservice to them.

Plus, in the middle of the rollout of the PARCC testing will be the election of a new governor in the fall, which could mean a change in state-level educational leadership, Ms. O'Connell Novick added.